Metacat is a repository for data and metadata (documentation about data) that helps
scientists find, understand and effectively use data sets they manage or that
have been created by others. Thousands of data sets are currently documented in
a standardized way and stored in Metacat systems, providing the scientific
community with a broad range of science data that–because the data are well and
consistently described–can be easily searched, compared, merged, or used
in other ways.